Events is for the money that does not walk in off the street: parties, buyouts, catering and anything else that fills the room on a date you agreed in advance. It runs from the first phone call to the paid invoice, and what you book here shows up in your forecast and your week.

What it is for

Event money behaves differently from bar money. It is agreed weeks ahead, it usually involves a deposit, and the balance turns up long after the night itself. Tracked in a notebook it is invisible to every other number you have. Tracked here it is cash you can see coming.

The whole section is optional. A bar that does not do parties never opens it, and Close The Week marks the Catering row optional.

The four screens

Event Booking

One record per party, worked from the first call to the paid invoice. Enquiry, quote, deposit, the event, the balance. Everything about that party lives on the one record instead of in three places.

Price Packages

Your saved packages and a quick calculator, both feeding your booking quotes. Set your per-head rates, minimums and room fees once and a quote stops being a thing you rebuild from memory on the phone.

Event Calendar

One month view of everything that fills the room: your booked events on their dates, the recognised holidays Bar Cop already knows, and the local dates you add yourself. The local ones matter most, because a stadium event or a town festival is worth more to your staffing than a national holiday is.

Track Regulars

Your regulars book: guests by name, by drink, by date. It is the one screen here that is not about a booked event, and it is there because the same people who book the party are usually the people already sitting at your bar.

What a booking feeds

• The Cash Forecast, where the balance you are still owed appears in the week you expect it.
• The Revenue Forecast, which adds booked event revenue to the week it falls in.
• Close The Week, where the Catering row fills itself from events in that week.
• The Revenue Audit, which scores Events as one of its five areas.

Two numbers that are not the same number

What an event was worth and what you are still owed are different questions, and Bar Cop keeps them apart. The pipeline column shows what the event was worth. The cash forecast shows what is still to come in. A party that was worth eight thousand and has been paid in full contributes nothing to the forecast, and that is correct rather than a figure gone missing.

Deposits are handled the same way. A deposit you are holding against a night that has not happened yet is not the same as revenue you have earned, and it is not treated as such.

Working a booking

1. Take the enquiry. Create the record on the call, even if it is only a date and a name.
2. Quote it from a package or the calculator.
3. Take the deposit and log it. The date matters, because that is when the money actually arrived.
4. Run the event.
5. Settle the balance. The record closes and the forecast stops expecting it.

Where to start

Price Packages, before you take another enquiry. Ten minutes setting your rates turns every future quote into a couple of clicks, and it is the difference between quoting consistently and quoting from whatever you said last time.

Every screen here has its own step-by-step directions in the app. Open the screen and tap the i in the top bar.